Alice left 256 early to catch a morning flight to West Virginia. We have lived at 256 East 10th since August. I carry her heavy blue bag down to the street corner. It’s not too cold and she wore a long green Mormon dress, a distressed purple sweater, and her favorite high-heeled boots. I want her to stay with me, but said nothing. We barely speak and both of us succumbed to the pull of our old homes. She to Appalachia and me to the South Shore of Boston for the holidays.

She hailed a cab and a Checker stopped on the corner of Fitst Avenue. I threw her bag in the back. Neither of us said good-bye, as if there was nothing in this city was holding her. Not me. Not her career. The taxi disappeared into the traffic. We hadn’t had sex since before she announced she was pregnant after the New Wave Vaudeville Show. These last weeks I had watched her weight gain. Some, but she had been eating like she had been rescued from starving on a deserted island.

After an hour I get a phone call from Jim Bottomly. He’s driving up to Maine and can drop me at the Sturbridge entrance to the Mass Pike. A good place from which to hitchhike to Boston. Last night the temperature had been below freezing. The New York Times forecasts it will be bitter cold tomorrow, but it’s only fifty five miles from Sturbridge to Boston. There is no mention of snow.

Later.

The Patriots announce that Chuck Fairbanks will be leaving the Patriots after the playoffs to coach at Colorado U. This move must have really charged the team for the playoffs. Why couldn’t he have waited till after the New Year? Probably because the Press had the news and couldn’t hold their sand.

Lately ruminating watching television, playing solitaire, and listening to the radio has a greater appeal than writing at the kitchen table. Claptrap no one wants to read.

Other than a stand-up piano and books on drama Alice left little trace. I smelled the pillow. She is too clean to leave a scent. I wonder if she is coming back. She might just go west to hit it big in Hollywood. Another young ingenue to the slaughterwhorehouse. No chance of being the sex symbol Hollywood wants in their grips, but I could go with her. I’ll be just as broke there as here.

Standing at the rear window overlooking the alley, I reflect on the past year. I fell in love for the first time in my life, not counting Janet Stetson, Linda Imhoff, Hilde Hartnett and Ro Lohin. All of them ended up in disaster. Not Alice. Our one night stand, a menage a trois in a chilly swimming pool graduated to a weekend fling to a summertime affair ot living together. I rescued Alice from her hometown. Chemical City. She would have come here anyway. The bright lights of the big city dazzled her hillbilly heritage. She is gone, but I live with her and she lives with me with no end in sight.

Second achievement also tied to Alice. I moved from the SRO on West 11th Street to 256 10th Street. My grandmother once said, “Better a bad apartment with a good address than a good apartment with a bad address. My SRO was a single room with linoleum floor and a sagging bed. Off a 5th Avenue. But a dump. 256 is a cockroach-ridden tenement apartment in a neighborhood beset by a drug epidemic, but I didn’t have a phone on 11th Street and now I can reach out to people, not that I have been able to find a good job.

I have worked at Serendipity 3 as a busboy, a waiter at an executive dining room on Wall Street, as a production assistant for an Edward Albee tour, and painted Alice’s father’s house in West Virginia. I haven’t done much since summer and the new year promises more nothing.

Bad things.

Too few to mention.

Maybe a baby.

What is Christmas

Snow falling between the drifts,

The glow on holiday lights in the windows

Falling on the winter wonderland.

Presents, giving and receiving.

Friends, old and new,

Families

Together

Telling old stories and future dreams

We celebrate the birth of Jesus

The legend celebrated by Christians. I’m an aethist.

I beleive more in Santa Claus.

The New Testament claims the Son of God

Was

Born in Bethelhem

The Son of God to be crucified

On a cross for our sins.

None of my sins required a death sentence.

Christians see Jesus as a God

Muslims regard him a a messiah.

Nothing like a religious war

For Jesus and Christmas Day

Later

Grant and I discussed the fact that Americans are poorly read, rarely roaming from the curriculum prescribed by a Christian government and the churches ruling over our souls. We watch too much TV and eat too much potato chips. Where are the Renaissance men? Damn, I can’t spell that word and I’m too lay to look it up the the dictionary.

2023 Renaissance.

Got it right on the second try.